All the attachments *should* now be working, since the server transition is finally complete (apparently an emergency transfer of hosts was necessary, causing all the issues).

EDIT: Nope, there are apparently lots of trashed images and completely missing ones, even though the transfer reported they all went ok. Most, probably all, of my threads have at least one missing and/or trashed image, and lots of them in some threads.

amberwolf wrote:All the attachments *should* now be working, since the server transition is finally complete (apparently an emergency transfer of hosts was necessary, causing all the issues).

EDIT: Nope, there are apparently lots of trashed images and completely missing ones, even though the transfer reported they all went ok. Most, probably all, of my threads have at least one missing and/or trashed image, and lots of them in some threads.

Got some checking going with KnightMB about that now.

I feared as much. Fortunately I have a copy of nearly every image and file uploaded, and those have already been pushed onto my domain in preparation for retargeting. Through pain, I shall begin editing and cleaning up the imposition

It would be prudent for the stakeholders to reevaluate their assets and determine a proper professional plan for host and backup. I am keen to assist in whatever manner is required should you ask. Though the backend appears to use competitive technology, nonetheless I wish to help and contribute to support this forum with blind faith, and to ensure this sort of happenstance does not occur again.

It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.
It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed.
The hands acquire shakes, the shakes become a warning.
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.

Not to sound bad but there is a beginning and ending to everything electronic. Its usually planned that software malfunctions or goes out of date. Then you have to upgrade and buy new stuff. Its all part of the big companies making their billions. Look how many computers and i-crap there have been. Constantly changing. Buy! Buy! Buy! Pure insanity. Buy the way, I can't even post a picture right now. Doesn't work.

D-Man wrote:Not to sound bad but there is a beginning and ending to everything electronic. Its usually planned that software malfunctions or goes out of date. Then you have to upgrade and buy new stuff. Its all part of the big companies making their billions. Look how many computers and i-crap there have been. Constantly changing. Buy! Buy! Buy! Pure insanity. Buy the way, I can't even post a picture right now. Doesn't work.

amberwolf wrote:All the attachments *should* now be working, since the server transition is finally complete (apparently an emergency transfer of hosts was necessary, causing all the issues).

EDIT: Nope, there are apparently lots of trashed images and completely missing ones, even though the transfer reported they all went ok. Most, probably all, of my threads have at least one missing and/or trashed image, and lots of them in some threads.

Got some checking going with KnightMB about that now.

I feared as much. Fortunately I have a copy of nearly every image and file uploaded, and those have already been pushed onto my domain in preparation for retargeting. Through pain, I shall begin editing and cleaning up the imposition

It would be prudent for the stakeholders to reevaluate their assets and determine a proper professional plan for host and backup. I am keen to assist in whatever manner is required should you ask. Though the backend appears to use competitive technology, nonetheless I wish to help and contribute to support this forum with blind faith, and to ensure this sort of happenstance does not occur again.

On a positive note, the forum sure is zippy this morning!
~KF

It took two days, but I have finally finished retargeting every image attachment in my posts back to my server. I checked every file attachment and they all seem to be in good shape; I didnâ€™t see a reason to re-target those.

The next task will be to correct the readability; replace the wonky character corruption affecting a large portion of posts.
~KF

It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.
It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed.
The hands acquire shakes, the shakes become a warning.
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.

Kingfish wrote:
It took two days, but I have finally finished retargeting every image attachment in my posts back to my server. I checked every file attachment and they all seem to be in good shape; I didnâ€™t see a reason to re-target those.
]

I have a splattering of images through my 100 plus page worklog for my cruiser that you can get too 're-targeting' for me now Kingfish theres a good lad hehe

Tiz definately a pisser all the pics gone across the forum, thought it was meant to be an 'upgrade' pages still hang and 1000's of images lost doesn't seem like an upgrade to me :-S

Heh KiM
Actually it was my fault for relaxing; I normally prefer to host my own content. However I became complacent and used attachments for about 70% of the posts. Surprizingly there were only two that I had to re-create/re-find. I hate production/repetitive tasks though: It puts me to sleep. Itâ€™s why I became a developer and I like doing prototypes because each one is a unique challenge.

I do not have good counsel for the graybeards of the Forum. In my mind â€“ there should have been plenty of opportunities to make physical backups â€“ and I cannot fathom how binary data â€“ even if stored in the database (whatever flavor it is) could have been corrupted; it doesnâ€™t add up. My ISP does a standing backup nightly, and I can schedule my own backup more frequent than that.

The next step though is to correct the typos; again I am at a loss why this isnâ€™t fixed yet. However â€“ it is a no-brainer as near as I can tell. Letâ€™s presume the worst and that the backup or copy is corrupted or that the translation from one source to another was bungled â€“ hence the corruption. We know that only certain characters were affected. It should be a simple task to note those characters (and I have my list) and craft a translation table for each one.

My Plan would go like this:
Make a copy of the present database; letâ€™s call it Copy-A. Then make a copy of that, and weâ€™ll call that Copy-B. Make a faux-Forum that is linked to Copy-B for an internally hosted site that the developers can see. Create the correction scripts to replace only one corrupted character at a time and run them on Copy-B, and view the results on the faux-Forum.

Did the correction go well?

Where there any issues with the correction?

If it looks good, then move on to the next characterâ€¦ and proceed on down the path until all the characters are fixed.

If Copy-B gets corrupted, make another copy from Copy-A. The state of the database never changes during the correction process; the Live Forum data is not affected while the fix is being researched and tested. Once all the scripts prove out â€“ and this process should only take hours, not days â€“ then take the ES Forum offline, run the scripts, and bring it back up. Done.

I canâ€™t spell it out any easier. I do this all the time for large and small clients. Iâ€™d write the scripts myself if I knew which flavor of database was used. SQL and MySQL are essentially the same, though it looks like phpBB can use other databases. The scripts are brain-dead simple.

I am more than happy to help. I donâ€™t need access to the database; I can create my own phpBB with SQL and plug in screwed up data from the existing content for testing. I just need to know what database theyâ€™re using.

It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.
It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed.
The hands acquire shakes, the shakes become a warning.
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.

AFAIK the move to the upgraded server and host wasn't done because it was an upgrade, but because KnightMB was suddenly given a very short two-day notice that the original host was going to shut down, so there were only those two days to move everything from the original host to the new one, and it was a close thing, but all of it transferred without error except for a handful of attachments, according to the transfer programs themselves. Obviously that's not the case, regarding attached images.

I've seen this particular form of image corruption a number of times when doing copies myself, across various types of media and connections, but nothing on this scale, even when I have copied over dozens of gigs of saved photos and scanned full-resolution images (100's of megs each). In all cases, no errors were reported by the transfer *or* by the following data-compare, yet the transferred images were corrupt and the sources were not. Makes absolutely no sense to me how that can happen.

Regarding the character "corruption", I don't believe that's what it is. I think that it is the "new" PHPBB server is not correctly interpreting the character set that the database is stored with. Most likely there is a setting or a plugin for the PHPBB server that would fix this, that is simply not yet installed or set correctly. I have no access to such things to find out, though, and haven't had time to google around on PHPBB support sites to see if it's an issue that's occured before. (I'm sure it has, though)

AFAIK, the site has a rolling 7-day backup already, so there should be at least a few complete uncorrupted sets of everything from before the corrupted copy-over. I would assume that those backups are now segregated so they won't be overwritten while this is sorted out, and that new backups are still being made daily.

I'd assume that the reason it's not sorted yet is that KnightMB probably has a hectic enough "dayjob", most likely in IT and whatnot based on what ES's home domain is about, and may not have had time to find the best and/or safest way to recopy the corrupted attachments out of the backups.

I figure I can be very patient about it, but I *am* taking the precaution of not posting much new stuff, especially images, until it is sorted out and fixed, and I am ensureing that I re-save all of my new posts as local copies of webpages each time (just in case).

I like to take pictures on my iphone, and then email myself the photo and downsize the pic and then post it here.

About half the time i do this the picture appears upside down on my post. Whats really weird about that is if i go and edit the pic in picassa or photoshop and turn the pic upside down and save it and repost it...it still appears upside down here....seems impossible but true.

The other weird phenomenon that if i look at the same post on my iphone the picture appears right side up.

Maybe try Preview (and use "Save As...") or just make a simple Automator app; in the Automator Library choose 'Photos' and drag the 'Rotate Image' action on, in the dialog that pops up hit 'Add' and then set the 'Rotate Image' thing to 180Â° and save as an application.

Another idea is to use OmniGraffle as a middle-man..drop an image into a new doc, rotate as-needed and then "export selection". And if those don't work then you could start shooting them upside down..?

edit; I downloaded your example pic and it appeared upside down for a split second in the preview on my desktop but then flipped itself right-side up. When I opened it it was right-side up..very weird.

This appears upside down on the desktop and viewed offline in Preview/whatever but it's right-side-up here...